I had to read it twice to work out what exactly was meant by googling something on the wireless? How do you google someone on the AM/FM Radio? Oh, a wireless network...
Even outside the context of the copying of Xerox's ideas it's rediculous. Apart from it's UI the iPhone borrowed heavily in every other way from existing phones
I'd argue it was the UI above all else that has made iOS the success that it is. The underlying technical aspects are nice for geeks such as you and me to appreciate, but it's the user interface and nothing else that has my mum, my wife, my brother and my 2 year old daughter all able to use an iPhone or an iPad with no prior instruction.
If iOS was a shrunken-down version of Mac OS X, like WinCE and the like, it would not have been anywhere near as successful as it is today - and Android wouldn't be where it is either without using the same gestures and concepts.
From those of us that have used touchscreens for 20 years. Yes tapping an icon is the same as clickong on an icon. It's not revolutionary in any way.
I had the first Tablet PC, a Dauphin DTR-1 it ran windows 3.11 and acted just like a iPhone except for swipes and gestures. Honestly, you think tapping an icon is revolutionary?
Emphasis mine - it was the swiped and gestures that Jobs was annoyed that Google copied. They are a huge part of what makes something like Android or iOS so much more usable on a small screen than a shrunken desktop user interface. Oh, and yes, I was using touch screens 20 years ago too. You pointed with your finger instead of moving and clicking a mouse - other than that, they were identical to the non-touch user interfaces.
From what I've heard, it was the gestures, like pinch-to-zoom, that he went ballistic over. Sure, they seem completely obvious and natural now, but they were introduced first on iOS and rapidly became the standard gestures for touch interfaces.
There's a big difference between a gesture-based interface which iOS largely is, and between a point and tap version of a desktop user interface. Something that was designed from the ground up for touch, not a shrunken desktop interface that is forced to fit a tablet or phone form factor.
Whilst iOS and Mac OS X may share a lot of the same stuff under-the-hood, their user interfaces are completely different as they are targeted at completely different usage scenarios. How good was Windows Mobile when it was a shrunken version of Windows with a Start menu and window title bars and crap like that? Waste of screen real-estate and you needed a stylus to make the most of it. As Jobs famously said "If you see a stylus, they blew it"
Just about all touch interfaces before iOS came out were really optimised for use with a physical keyboard and a stylus to some degree. iOS broke with all that tradition - they didn't try to fit Mac OS X on a tiny screen, it was completely new.
And therein is the point that people are making. Sure, it may not be release-worthy, but if it's not released then it's not as open as Google claim it is. Like I said, I don't personally have a problem with that - if it's that bad I probably wouldn't release it either, but then I couldn't turn around and tell everyone how open my system was.
Personally, I agree with their decisions. If something's going to be crap, don't release it until it's fixed. Don't be taking a holier-than-thou stance and say you're open and the competition is closed though.
Open Source doesn't mean "I'll release the source for this because I think it's useful to you" or "I'll not release the source to this, because we don't want you to hurt yourself, even though we're claiming that it's as easy as "mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git. kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make""
Open Source means you release the source. Plain and simple.
There's a big difference between an OS going from ~$100 to $40 to $30 and over $2k of professional software being sold now as a $50 add-on. I'm not complaining that I can now get OS X Server on my desktop machine, I'm just saying that there is a definite pattern in consumerising everything - there's a fair amount of stuff that has been dumbed down in the new OS X Server that makes stuff more difficult or impossible in some environments and I see this continuing.
No worries then - what you say is completely correct then, you can observe the distance between two particles increasing at 2c. Somewhere in the conversation thread, I thought someone was saying that this would equate to a speed of 2c.
You don't seem to understand relativity. It's perfectly possible for the scenario you describe to happen. You shine two torches away from each other, the photons from each torch are moving at c.
Whilst the distance between them grows at a greater rate than the distance between you and either one of the photons, there's nothing special going on here. You don't see anything moving faster than c
The latest offerings from VMware and more so Parallels are outstanding in terms of integration and functionality. I've never had any problems running Windows on a Mac and these days most Linux distros boot straight up. I'm not sure there's a huge amount of room for improvement on these things as they're already so good...
Are you for real? Apple have such tight supply chains that other manufacturers can't even come close to them in equivalent hardware. Who else can make a tablet the equal of an iPad at the same price point as an iPad? Who else can make a laptop the equal of a MacBook Air at the same price point? How come Intel is investing millions of dollars to get other OEMs up to speed in making so called ultrabooks?
If anything, Apple are offering competitive prices on their hardware to increase usage of the App store where they make a 30% cut. Apple are dropping prices on their "pro" software to consumer prices to further adoption. Witness Mac OS X Server + Xsan. Once was over $1k for OS X Server plus another grand for Xsan. Now it's fifty bucks. The price drops in Final Cut Pro, their cutting the price of Aperture when it went from a box product to the App store etc.
Suction cups and sticky cleaning rollers are hardly common but I wouldn't call torx exotic... Personally I prefer a torx over an phillips head as it's easier to use and far less likely to cam out.
Cancellation of the Xserve RAID, cancellation of the Xserve. Long product lifecycles for the Mac Pro. Abysmal support for Apple-branded Promise RAID. Refusal to sell a previous version of the OS, or support it on new hardware, the day a new version of the OS ships. Consumerisation of their pro software lines. Glossy displays on everything.
Mac OS X Server - once was $1400 AUD in 10.5, dropped to $700 AUD for 10.6 and then dropped to $50 as an optional install in 10.7 - plus this includes a $1k license of Xsan too. I think this pricepoint shows the amount of attention it is going to receive in terms of development effort.
And people who can't get past that and avoid LibreOffice as a result of their own prejudice can do without. I'm fine with that.
You may be, but this doesn't help the project as a whole. As companies like Apple have shown, marketing rules when you want to gain wider acceptance.
This is the reason that the GIMP Print drivers that Apple includes in OS X are now called Gutenprint. While you and I know perfectly where the gimp name came from and may not care, the fact is that decision makers in companies that are trying to adopt these products do care and cute names like this hinder widespread adoptance.
OpenOffice is a great name and has helped people accept the product when they don't know or care about open source, free vs Free, beer vs speech and all that.
How do you get around the restrictions on civilian GPS. Whilst I'm sure this was taken into account, civilian GPS receivers are limited to speeds quite a bit below the speed achieved, and altitudes of around half of the achieved altitude:
"The U.S. Government controls the export of some civilian receivers. All GPS receivers capable of functioning above 18 kilometres (11 mi) altitude and 515 metres per second (1,001 kn) are classified as munitions (weapons) for which U.S. State Department export licenses are required."
3,516 km/h is just over 975 m/sec and you estimate an altitude of more than twice the restricted altitude.
Even if it's a soft fail in the GPS module and it cuts back in when the "out of spec" conditions are no longer experienced, it would still make it difficult to record the maximum altitude if you're 18+km above that which a regular GPS will register.
Lots of people I know manually file emails. Some people have (almost) more folders than filed emails. I scratch my head in amazement when I see someone with a massive folder structure and two or three emails in most of the folders. Me, everything sits in the inbox for up to 3 months and then it all gets dumped out in an archive folder (2011 Q2, 2011 Q3 etc).
I used to file emails, but now (at least on my Mac) search works so damn well that it's faster in every way than filing emails in folders and then trying to dig through those folders again manually to find the email.
If I can remember enough about the email to know which folder I would have put it in, that right there is more than enough information to search.
Spotlight on OS X is a full text index of everything that the OS understands, attachments included. Full text index of body text, some email headers (to, from, subject) and attachments (text, MS Office formats, PDF etc).
In order to prevent my inbox from growing too big (and, really, how big is too big? I honestly don't know) I archive it to a folder once a quarter (2011 Q1, 2011 Q2 etc) I never ever sift through these folders myself, I just hit up the search interface and find what I'm after that way. The advantage is that it's no slower to find email and I spend about 2 minutes once every three months to file my email.
Previous to this, I used to have a script I'd run daily to parse the From: addresses in the email, extract the company name from the domain name and file emails away automatically, but then whenever I wanted to retrieve an old email I just searched for it anyway.
I don't know if you're joking or not, but I know a number of people who, once they've finished reading an email in their inbox, they file it away for permanent storage with the delete key. One guy I went to see recently had, I kid you not, over 36k items in the Trash. That was less than 18 months of email.
I wonder how they planned to get around the restrictions on civilian GPS. Whilst I'm sure they took this into account (at least I hope both they and John Carmack did) is that civilian GPS receivers are limited to speeds quite a bit below their speed, and altitudes of around half of the achieved altitude:
"The U.S. Government controls the export of some civilian receivers. All GPS receivers capable of functioning above 18 kilometres (11 mi) altitude and 515 metres per second (1,001 kn) are classified as munitions (weapons) for which U.S. State Department export licenses are required."
3,516 km/h is just over 975 m/sec and they estimate an altitude of more than twice the restricted altitude.
Adobe Acrobat has a REDACTION feature built specifically to address issues like this. It's not hard to use - arguably it's even easier than trying to find the text and putting a black background behind it. It not only removes the text (or other objects) on the page that you are redacting, but it provides a very easy interface to use. It also removes additional metadata (full text indexes, other personalised information such as document creator etc) and you can do a search and redact to redact specific strings.
It's not a new feature, it's been in Acrobat for years now and it works very, very well.
I can not believe that in places where this matters, people don't use it - it should be part of the job requirements, if they're redacting information they have to be trained on the workflow to do so - and I could train someone to do this within a couple of hours even if they've never used Acrobat before.
It would be one thing if they were using a format other than PDF - redacting a Word document is possibly quite a bit harder, but if the end result is a PDF that's been redacted, there's no reason at all to not use Acrobat to do it properly, especially if you're a government department as you get Acrobat for a fraction of the street price.
The original Gameboy link cable port is actually the inspiration for most modern connector types, such as USB and FireWire.
Re:What he took away is more precious than given
on
Steve Jobs Dead At 56
·
· Score: 1
You know what, in three years of iPhone ownership, this hasn't bothered me in the slightest. I'd even go so far as to say that the thought never crossed my mine "Gee, I wish this device had a memory card slot" and I can access all my files if I need to. I don't need a memory card slot as my phone's got enough storage for everything I need to do with it.
Re:What he took away is more precious than given
on
Steve Jobs Dead At 56
·
· Score: 1
Slashdot Mirror
I had to read it twice to work out what exactly was meant by googling something on the wireless? How do you google someone on the AM/FM Radio? Oh, a wireless network...
Even outside the context of the copying of Xerox's ideas it's rediculous. Apart from it's UI the iPhone borrowed heavily in every other way from existing phones
I'd argue it was the UI above all else that has made iOS the success that it is. The underlying technical aspects are nice for geeks such as you and me to appreciate, but it's the user interface and nothing else that has my mum, my wife, my brother and my 2 year old daughter all able to use an iPhone or an iPad with no prior instruction.
If iOS was a shrunken-down version of Mac OS X, like WinCE and the like, it would not have been anywhere near as successful as it is today - and Android wouldn't be where it is either without using the same gestures and concepts.
From those of us that have used touchscreens for 20 years. Yes tapping an icon is the same as clickong on an icon. It's not revolutionary in any way.
I had the first Tablet PC, a Dauphin DTR-1 it ran windows 3.11 and acted just like a iPhone except for swipes and gestures.
Honestly, you think tapping an icon is revolutionary?
Emphasis mine - it was the swiped and gestures that Jobs was annoyed that Google copied. They are a huge part of what makes something like Android or iOS so much more usable on a small screen than a shrunken desktop user interface. Oh, and yes, I was using touch screens 20 years ago too. You pointed with your finger instead of moving and clicking a mouse - other than that, they were identical to the non-touch user interfaces.
From what I've heard, it was the gestures, like pinch-to-zoom, that he went ballistic over. Sure, they seem completely obvious and natural now, but they were introduced first on iOS and rapidly became the standard gestures for touch interfaces.
There's a big difference between a gesture-based interface which iOS largely is, and between a point and tap version of a desktop user interface. Something that was designed from the ground up for touch, not a shrunken desktop interface that is forced to fit a tablet or phone form factor.
Whilst iOS and Mac OS X may share a lot of the same stuff under-the-hood, their user interfaces are completely different as they are targeted at completely different usage scenarios. How good was Windows Mobile when it was a shrunken version of Windows with a Start menu and window title bars and crap like that? Waste of screen real-estate and you needed a stylus to make the most of it. As Jobs famously said "If you see a stylus, they blew it"
Just about all touch interfaces before iOS came out were really optimised for use with a physical keyboard and a stylus to some degree. iOS broke with all that tradition - they didn't try to fit Mac OS X on a tiny screen, it was completely new.
And therein is the point that people are making. Sure, it may not be release-worthy, but if it's not released then it's not as open as Google claim it is.
Like I said, I don't personally have a problem with that - if it's that bad I probably wouldn't release it either, but then I couldn't turn around and tell everyone how open my system was.
Personally, I agree with their decisions. If something's going to be crap, don't release it until it's fixed.
Don't be taking a holier-than-thou stance and say you're open and the competition is closed though.
Open Source doesn't mean "I'll release the source for this because I think it's useful to you" or "I'll not release the source to this, because we don't want you to hurt yourself, even though we're claiming that it's as easy as "mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git. kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make""
Open Source means you release the source. Plain and simple.
There's a big difference between an OS going from ~$100 to $40 to $30 and over $2k of professional software being sold now as a $50 add-on.
I'm not complaining that I can now get OS X Server on my desktop machine, I'm just saying that there is a definite pattern in consumerising everything - there's a fair amount of stuff that has been dumbed down in the new OS X Server that makes stuff more difficult or impossible in some environments and I see this continuing.
No worries then - what you say is completely correct then, you can observe the distance between two particles increasing at 2c. Somewhere in the conversation thread, I thought someone was saying that this would equate to a speed of 2c.
You don't seem to understand relativity. It's perfectly possible for the scenario you describe to happen. You shine two torches away from each other, the photons from each torch are moving at c.
Whilst the distance between them grows at a greater rate than the distance between you and either one of the photons, there's nothing special going on here. You don't see anything moving faster than c
There's nothing locked down about any non-iOS hardware that Apple makes.
Apple have given up trying to compete with with Microsoft and are going after an entirely different market altogether.
Microsoft work their way into the enterprise from corporate policy. Apple work their way into the enterprise through personal choice.
The latest offerings from VMware and more so Parallels are outstanding in terms of integration and functionality.
I've never had any problems running Windows on a Mac and these days most Linux distros boot straight up.
I'm not sure there's a huge amount of room for improvement on these things as they're already so good...
Are you for real? Apple have such tight supply chains that other manufacturers can't even come close to them in equivalent hardware.
Who else can make a tablet the equal of an iPad at the same price point as an iPad?
Who else can make a laptop the equal of a MacBook Air at the same price point? How come Intel is investing millions of dollars to get other OEMs up to speed in making so called ultrabooks?
If anything, Apple are offering competitive prices on their hardware to increase usage of the App store where they make a 30% cut. Apple are dropping prices on their "pro" software to consumer prices to further adoption. Witness Mac OS X Server + Xsan. Once was over $1k for OS X Server plus another grand for Xsan. Now it's fifty bucks. The price drops in Final Cut Pro, their cutting the price of Aperture when it went from a box product to the App store etc.
Suction cups and sticky cleaning rollers are hardly common but I wouldn't call torx exotic...
Personally I prefer a torx over an phillips head as it's easier to use and far less likely to cam out.
Yes.
Cancellation of the Xserve RAID, cancellation of the Xserve. Long product lifecycles for the Mac Pro. Abysmal support for Apple-branded Promise RAID.
Refusal to sell a previous version of the OS, or support it on new hardware, the day a new version of the OS ships.
Consumerisation of their pro software lines. Glossy displays on everything.
Mac OS X Server - once was $1400 AUD in 10.5, dropped to $700 AUD for 10.6 and then dropped to $50 as an optional install in 10.7 - plus this includes a $1k license of Xsan too. I think this pricepoint shows the amount of attention it is going to receive in terms of development effort.
And people who can't get past that and avoid LibreOffice as a result of their own prejudice can do without. I'm fine with that.
You may be, but this doesn't help the project as a whole. As companies like Apple have shown, marketing rules when you want to gain wider acceptance.
This is the reason that the GIMP Print drivers that Apple includes in OS X are now called Gutenprint. While you and I know perfectly where the gimp name came from and may not care, the fact is that decision makers in companies that are trying to adopt these products do care and cute names like this hinder widespread adoptance.
OpenOffice is a great name and has helped people accept the product when they don't know or care about open source, free vs Free, beer vs speech and all that.
How do you get around the restrictions on civilian GPS. Whilst I'm sure this was taken into account, civilian GPS receivers are limited to speeds quite a bit below the speed achieved, and altitudes of around half of the achieved altitude:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System#Restrictions_on_civilian_use
"The U.S. Government controls the export of some civilian receivers. All GPS receivers capable of functioning above 18 kilometres (11 mi) altitude and 515 metres per second (1,001 kn) are classified as munitions (weapons) for which U.S. State Department export licenses are required."
3,516 km/h is just over 975 m/sec and you estimate an altitude of more than twice the restricted altitude.
Even if it's a soft fail in the GPS module and it cuts back in when the "out of spec" conditions are no longer experienced, it would still make it difficult to record the maximum altitude if you're 18+km above that which a regular GPS will register.
Lots of people I know manually file emails. Some people have (almost) more folders than filed emails. I scratch my head in amazement when I see someone with a massive folder structure and two or three emails in most of the folders. Me, everything sits in the inbox for up to 3 months and then it all gets dumped out in an archive folder (2011 Q2, 2011 Q3 etc).
I used to file emails, but now (at least on my Mac) search works so damn well that it's faster in every way than filing emails in folders and then trying to dig through those folders again manually to find the email.
If I can remember enough about the email to know which folder I would have put it in, that right there is more than enough information to search.
Spotlight on OS X is a full text index of everything that the OS understands, attachments included. Full text index of body text, some email headers (to, from, subject) and attachments (text, MS Office formats, PDF etc).
In order to prevent my inbox from growing too big (and, really, how big is too big? I honestly don't know) I archive it to a folder once a quarter (2011 Q1, 2011 Q2 etc) I never ever sift through these folders myself, I just hit up the search interface and find what I'm after that way. The advantage is that it's no slower to find email and I spend about 2 minutes once every three months to file my email.
Previous to this, I used to have a script I'd run daily to parse the From: addresses in the email, extract the company name from the domain name and file emails away automatically, but then whenever I wanted to retrieve an old email I just searched for it anyway.
I don't know if you're joking or not, but I know a number of people who, once they've finished reading an email in their inbox, they file it away for permanent storage with the delete key. One guy I went to see recently had, I kid you not, over 36k items in the Trash. That was less than 18 months of email.
I wonder how they planned to get around the restrictions on civilian GPS. Whilst I'm sure they took this into account (at least I hope both they and John Carmack did) is that civilian GPS receivers are limited to speeds quite a bit below their speed, and altitudes of around half of the achieved altitude:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System#Restrictions_on_civilian_use
"The U.S. Government controls the export of some civilian receivers. All GPS receivers capable of functioning above 18 kilometres (11 mi) altitude and 515 metres per second (1,001 kn) are classified as munitions (weapons) for which U.S. State Department export licenses are required."
3,516 km/h is just over 975 m/sec and they estimate an altitude of more than twice the restricted altitude.
Adobe Acrobat has a REDACTION feature built specifically to address issues like this.
It's not hard to use - arguably it's even easier than trying to find the text and putting a black background behind it.
It not only removes the text (or other objects) on the page that you are redacting, but it provides a very easy interface to use.
It also removes additional metadata (full text indexes, other personalised information such as document creator etc) and you can do a search and redact to redact specific strings.
It's not a new feature, it's been in Acrobat for years now and it works very, very well.
I can not believe that in places where this matters, people don't use it - it should be part of the job requirements, if they're redacting information they have to be trained on the workflow to do so - and I could train someone to do this within a couple of hours even if they've never used Acrobat before.
It would be one thing if they were using a format other than PDF - redacting a Word document is possibly quite a bit harder, but if the end result is a PDF that's been redacted, there's no reason at all to not use Acrobat to do it properly, especially if you're a government department as you get Acrobat for a fraction of the street price.
The original Gameboy link cable port is actually the inspiration for most modern connector types, such as USB and FireWire.
You know what, in three years of iPhone ownership, this hasn't bothered me in the slightest. I'd even go so far as to say that the thought never crossed my mine "Gee, I wish this device had a memory card slot" and I can access all my files if I need to. I don't need a memory card slot as my phone's got enough storage for everything I need to do with it.
This on the other hand does count.